This invention relates generally to authenticating individuals, and more particularly, to a method and system for biometric authentication.
Generally, biometric authentication systems are used to identify and verify the identity of individuals and are used in many different contexts such as verifying the identity of individuals entering a country using electronic passports. Biometric authentication systems have also been known to verify the identity of individuals using driver's licenses, traveler's tokens, employee identity cards and banking cards.
Known biometric authentication system search engines generally identify individuals using biometric feature templates derived from raw biometric data captured from individuals. Specifically, a biometric feature template derived from biometric data captured from an individual during authentication is compared against a database of previously derived biometric feature templates, and the identity of the individual is verified upon determining a match between one of the stored biometric feature templates and the biometric feature template derived during authentication. However, comparing biometric feature templates against a database of biometric feature templates may place substantial demands on computer system memory and processing which may result in unacceptably long authentication periods. Moreover, such known biometric authentication system search engines are generally highly specialized and proprietary.
By virtue of being highly specialized and proprietary it has been known to be difficult, time consuming and costly to modify known biometric authentication search engines to operate with other authentication systems. Furthermore, known biometric authentication search engines, by virtue of evaluating only biometric data of an individual for authentication, in many cases, do not provide an adequate amount of information about the individual to yield consistently accurate authentication results.